Chapter 1 1

CHAPTER ONE: THE WORST LAST JOB IN HISTORY

Sabels's pov

My office, such as it was, occupied a converted storage unit above a laundromat that smelled permanently of fabric softener, and I had spent that particular morning updating my retirement countdown on a sticky note stuck to my ancient monitor, four days left, one skip remaining, one very large payday standing between me and a life that did not involve chasing strangers through alleys for a living.

"Curtis Boone," I'd read aloud from the file, sipping coffee that had gone cold an hour earlier.

"Embezzlement, no violent history, no combat training. This is going to be the easiest four thousand dollars I've ever made."

I want it noted, for the record, that I have never once in eight years correctly predicted how a job was going to go, and this particular prediction ranks among my worst.

Eight years of chasing skips for cash had taught me exactly one universal truth, the easy looking jobs were always the ones that ended with you sprinting down an alley questioning every decision that had led you to this exact career, and my supposedly final bounty was shaping up to be the platinum standard of that particular rule.

"You are not that fast," I panted at the man currently outrunning me by a considerable margin, a low level embezzler named Curtis Boone who had, according to his file, no combat training and no reason whatsoever to be clearing a six foot fence like it was a speed bump.

Curtis did not stop to discuss the accuracy of his file.

I hit the fence a full two seconds behind him, cursed extensively, and dropped into the alley on the other side just in time to watch Curtis Boone stop running entirely, plant both feet, and do something to his own spine that no human body was supposed to be capable of doing.

"Oh, that's not good," I breathed, watching my skip's shoulders widen, his clothes tear, fur rippling up his forearms in a wave that should have been physically impossible and was, nevertheless, happening directly in front of me. "That is extremely not good."

Curtis Boone finished becoming a wolf roughly the size of a compact car and turned to look at me with an expression that, even without human features, communicated with perfect clarity exactly how thoroughly I had just become his problem instead of the other way around.

I had precisely one weapon on me, a taser rated for human nervous systems, and precisely zero training in what to do when your skip trace turns into a horror movie.

"We can talk about this," I offered, backing toward the fence I had absolutely no time to reclimb. "I'm sure there's a payment plan for the bounty that doesn't involve you eating me."

Curtis, unmoved by my financial creativity, lunged.

I did not die, which felt, in the immediate aftermath, like the single most surprising development of an already deeply surprising evening.

Because approximately half a second before several hundred pounds of wolf reached me, something considerably larger hit Curtis from the side hard enough to slam him into a dumpster with a crash that echoed off every building on the block.

I stood frozen against the fence, staring at a second wolf, black furred and enormous in a way that made Curtis look almost reasonably sized by comparison, currently pinning my skip to the pavement with a paw the size of a dinner plate.

The black wolf looked up at me.

Then, with the specific, unhurried confidence of someone who had never once needed to rush anything in his life, it began to shift back, fur receding, shoulders narrowing, until a man was crouched where the wolf had been a moment earlier, dark haired, built like a small apocalypse, and entirely, infuriatingly calm given the circumstances.

"You're bleeding," he observed, studying a scrape on my arm I hadn't even registered getting.

"There is a werewolf on the ground in front of me."

"Yes."

"You are also apparently a werewolf."

"Also yes." He rose, dusting off hands that had recently been paws, entirely unbothered by his own nudity in a way that suggested this was not his first unplanned shift of the week.

"Curtis here owes my organization considerably more money than he owes your client. I'd suggest stepping back while I finish this conversation with him."

"Your organization."

"Long story. Short version, he embezzled from the wrong people twice." The stranger crouched beside the now whimpering, still shifted Curtis, murmured something too low for me to catch, and Curtis's wolf form flattened submissively against the pavement like a scolded dog roughly the size of a small horse.

"There. That should hold him until my people arrive to collect."

I was still pressed against the fence, brain working through several competing emergencies at once, the existence of werewolves, the destruction of my last paycheck's primary asset, and the fact that a large, mostly naked man had just casually solved a problem I'd been actively dying to a second ago.

"Who are you," I managed finally.

Something shifted behind his eyes, brief and unreadable, gone before I could name it. "Kieran," he said. "Kieran Sinclair."

"That's not what I asked. I asked who you are, not what your name is."

"I'm aware of the distinction. I'm choosing to answer the easier question first." He studied me a long moment, and something in the weight of that attention made the back of my neck prickle in a way that had nothing to do with fear at all.

"Sable Cross. Twenty nine. You've been chasing skips for eight years under the trade name Wraith, and this was supposed to be your last job before retirement."

My whole body went cold. "How do you know my name."

"That's a longer conversation than we currently have time for." He glanced past me, toward the mouth of the alley, where I could hear the distant, approaching sound of what I assumed were his people arriving to deal with Curtis.

"You've just seen something you weren't supposed to survive seeing, Sable. Standard procedure from here involves your memory or your body, and I'd genuinely rather not do either to you tonight."

"That's incredibly reassuring, thank you."

"I'm being honest with you. I could have lied and let you feel better about the next ten minutes." Something that might have been the ghost of dry humor flickered across his face despite the tension. "I don't think lying to you is going to work particularly well long term, given what I actually need from you."

"What you need from me."

Before he could answer, three more figures appeared at the alley's mouth, and Curtis's whimpering wolf form was hauled up onto some kind of transport gurney with an efficiency that suggested this was, horrifyingly, a routine Tuesday for these people.

Kieran watched the process with half his attention, the other half still fixed on me with an intensity I did not know what to do with.

"Come with me," he offered. "Somewhere we can actually talk. I promise you an explanation, a considerable amount of money, and answers to questions you've been asking your whole life without knowing you were asking them."

"That sentence made no sense."

"It'll make considerably more sense in an hour."

He extended a hand, entirely too calm for a man asking a terrified skip tracer to walk willingly into a world she'd just learned existed twenty minutes ago. "I promise you, Sable. Whatever you're currently guessing about tonight, the truth is stranger."

I looked at his hand. I looked at the retreating gurney carrying my very large, very unconscious final paycheck. I

I looked, finally, at the man who had just saved my life with the casual efficiency of someone flicking away a mosquito, and who apparently had known my name, my history, and my career before tonight ever happened at all.

"If this is a kidnapping," I muttered, "I want it on record that I am extremely unimpressed by your technique."

"Noted," Kieran replied, something almost like a real smile tugging at his mouth. "For what it's worth, it isn't. Not exactly."

"Not exactly is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence."

"Yes," he agreed. "It is."

"Give me one reason to trust a man who just admitted to knowing my entire life story without my permission."

"I don't have a good one. I have an honest one instead." He studied me a long moment, something careful and searching in his expression.

"You've spent eight years surviving entirely on your own instincts, Sable. I'm not going to insult those instincts by pretending I've earned your trust in the last ten minutes. I'm simply asking you to give me the length of one conversation to try."

I looked at his outstretched hand one more time, weighed it against every reasonable instinct screaming at me to run in the opposite direction, and found, to my own considerable irritation, that curiosity was winning.

"One conversation," I said. "That's all you get."

"I'll take it."